Fight Club

The Fight to Self-Reliance

Picture waking up everyday simply to follow the same things you did the day before. The narrator in the film Fight Club possesses that image just like every other being a part of society. That is, until his conscience comes alive and goes against his original beliefs of conformity. Tyler Durden, the narrators alter ego, is a nonconformist who promotes the idea that it's okay not to be perfect. His plan is to rid the world of materialism and "let the chips fall where they may" which points out the ideals of Emerson's transcendentalism. In order to be self-reliant, one must be able to refrain from having material objects consume them.

Society promises to reward the conformists who seek a purpose but yet they feel alone. According to Thoreau and his beliefs, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Tyler's fight club encourages the people in quiet desperation to provoke their anger at society for its false promises. Fight club freed these men of constantly having to obey rules. "We were finding out more and more that there were men just like us...After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down...You could deal with anything." The fact that they had these men to empathize with through fighting made them feel as if they were actually not alone. They did not rely on their material belongings anymore, in fact they were constantly learning ways to rely on themselves. Therefore, their idea that material belongings were all that were needed to be complete was another one of societies false promises.

The false promises were what Tyler Durden was trying to point out. He was trying to rid people's minds from what society expected and from their reliance on material possessions. The narrator speaks for all conformists in society when he says "that condo was my life. I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed. It was me!" which concludes to Tyler's quote saying "the things you own, end up owning you." These objects were consuming the people who owned them. Life's significance is based on what one owns and how much they own. According to Thoreau, "Our